I am working from a general assumption that if we place a bet and the price goes off shorter we can say that our bet was good value.
As a reader of TFT, I have gleaned the following:-
- If we can beat the price on Betfair then we can generally say that the bet is a good one. I understand there are some caveats to this around illiquid markets.
- If we can take advantage of offers like free bets, enhanced EW terms, money back specials etc, then we can usually use maths to prove that we can beat betfair and therefore have value. This explains it very well -
http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=61477.0- If we can use our understanding of a market to show that the price is incorrect then we can place a bet, expecting the price to shorten, and therefore prove the bet was good value.
I assume that the majority of the bets that we place as ‘thinking punters’ will be focussed on the third point. I have seen lots of examples where it is really clear that the bookies have made a mistake and we have taken advantage – i.e. a horse is priced at 8/1 when we get on, it shortens dramatically before the off and we cheer it home. I guess this is just because the people who draw up these odds made an error and our extensive racing knowledge means we can spot it and get on. Another example – some score line prices on a relatively obscure football match look incorrect based on previous data. Again – priced up incorrectly and we can get on.
Another example – we look at a Premiership striker and suggest a bet on the overs for his goals for the season. Or we look at a cricket match and suggest a bet on a win for a certain team. Or we look at a Rugby League match and suggest a bet on a try scorer etc. etc. What I am struggling to get my head around is understanding why and how we can show that these bets are really value? In the majority of cases we are not taking advantage of any information that the bookies don’t have access to – are we saying that bookies are pricing up markets incorrectly day in day out?
TFT and pro punters seem to prove that a positive ROI over a large sample of bets is possible. They must be picking out a solid number of good value bets to achieve this. I don’t understand how we can have multiple bets every day and continue to find these edges. I like the thought of approaching bets analytically but I get the feeling I will probably be able to come up with <5 bets per year that really will be true value.
Is there some sort of process/checklist we can follow to finding value bets? I guess that becoming a specialist in a certain market is a good start.
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